everything to read instead of doomscroll this week by @stephthefounder (August 3)

The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x

and an underrated stat I’m most excited by:

there’s also a quote in there that i love - “Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now”. on one hand - this means a ton more competition because everyone has the same access/tools. on the other hand - this also means it’s never been able to compete because the power of gatekeepers (VCs, incumbents, etc) has never been weaker.

there’s a lot to criticize about AI (and particularly how it’s talked about in media/from our leaders which adds to the fear mongering/negative sentiment), but the leveling of access to opportunity feels real (and i’m excited for the people who have the ambition and courage to take advantage!)

Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.

And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:

1. you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏

2. all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win

(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)

This week’s featured companies:

• Fish Audio: Developing open-source and hosted AI voice models for creators and enterprises, this Palo Alto-based startup raised a $52 million seed round co-led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today.

  • No job openings, but stay tuned!

• Enigma: building robotics foundation models and interfaces that make robots easier for humans to control. The one-year-old company raised a $71 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital

  • No job openings, but stay tuned!

• Etched: Rack-scale inference clusters for frontier AI workloads. They raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation led by Sequoia

  • Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

• P-1 AI (AI engineer for industrial teams) ⚙️ → $50M Series A (Job openings here)

• Harmony (AI workplace request hub) 🧑‍💻 → $34M Seed (Job openings here)

• Paper (design-to-code canvas) 🎨 → $34M Series A (No job openings, but stay tuned!)

• Henry AI (AI for CRE deal docs) 🏢 → $16.5M Series A (Job openings here)

• Pangram (AI-content detection) 🔍 → $9M Round (Job openings here)

• Antares (factory-built microreactors) ⚛️ → $470M Series C (Job openings here)

• Dwelly (AI property management) 🏠 → $95M Series B (Job openings here)

• Claros Technologies (PFAS destruction tech) 💧 → $55M Series B (Job openings here)

All the best things I’ve read this week

1. What the humans like is responsiveness by Sasha Chapin: ever wonder why some people have that “it” magnetic factor? love how this essay positions it: responsiveness (!!)

2. A Surprising Portion of Rent-Stabilized Apartments Go to NYC’s Wealthiest Renters by Rebecca Picciotto and Neil Mehta (WSJ): for econ nerds (like me 🤓) who like to understand the mechanics behind the policy, this was an interesting read about how the top quartile of earners in rent stabilized apartments are benefitting a lot more (saving ~$1000/month) than the lower quartiles (saving only ~$300/month). In big part due to borough discrepancy:

3. Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life by Clay Routledge (NYT): about how our society’s obsession with mental health + the terminology could be causing us to actually become more mentally unwell. (tangentially related: i recently read and enjoyed Empire of Madness, a book about how the labeling/treatment of mental health in the US might actually be exacerbating/ineffective)

All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:

• 1,300+ employees from the world’s top AI companies are asking governments to build an AI brake pedal

  • The statement, called Pacing the Frontier, has been signed by people across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta (including Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg)

  • They aren’t calling for an immediate AI pause. They’re asking the U.S. government to lead an international effort to create the technical and political tools needed to slow frontier development if AI begins improving AI faster than humans can safely understand or control it

  • The basic argument:

    • Labs think AI may soon automate substantial parts of AI research

    • That could make capabilities advance much faster

    • No company or country wants to slow down alone and lose the race

    • So if we ever urgently need to slow everyone down, there is currently no mechanism for doing it

• Apparently OpenAI wasn’t the only AI lab accidentally hacking real companies 💀 This week, Anthropic admitted its models also breached three real companies during cybersecurity tests (apparently because its evaluation partner misconfigured the environment and accidentally gave the agents internet access)

  • The incidents happened separately over three months. The models found weak passwords and unsecured endpoints, then continued attacking what they believed were simulated targets

  • The most advanced model was the only one that stopped

  • Meanwhile, OpenAI’s latest investigation found that its agents accessed credentials tied to four additional third-party accounts while hacking Hugging Face

• Google put AI image generation inside Google Earth—and pulled it one day later

  • Google briefly let people use Nano Banana inside Google Earth to transform real places into fires, war zones, destroyed cities and scenes of refugees at borders

  • The images weren’t added to the public map, but users could share screenshots that looked like they came from Google Earth 🫠

  • After ~24 hours and a lot of backlash, Google pulled the feature while it works on “stronger safeguards.”

• one of the wildest stories (eBay stalking scandal) I’ve ever read: eBay is paying nearly $56M over employees terrorizing two newsletter writers

  • Ina and David Steiner publish EcommerceBytes, a newsletter covering e-commerce companies, including eBay

  • After executives became angry about their coverage, eBay employees launched an absolutely unhinged intimidation campaign that included:

    • Sending the couple live insects, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask

    • Threatening them through anonymous social accounts

    • Surveilling their home in person

  • Multiple former employees were convicted. eBay has now agreed to pay the Steiners nearly $50M, plus approximately $7M in charitable contributions.

  • The settlement has no confidentiality clause, meaning the Steiners are still free to publicly talk about everything that happened 🤭

• And a story that would surprise me had I not been on TikTok seeing all the OpenAI brand trip backlash… Hank Green apologized for relying too heavily on AI

  • Hank Green admitted to using ChatGPT to locate papers/research materials and the internet was not happy

  • In a longer apology, he said the process had diluted his work and made it difficult to clearly account for how each video came together.

  • He plans to reduce his production schedule and said the dopamine he was getting from using LLMs to do “more and more and more” had become unhealthy

every week I want to highlight cool projects, opportunities, fundings, etc from this community! these are free and are curated for things that are the most helpful/inspiring/interesting for other members of this group. for more context and to submit any cool projects etc, please see here! (they’ll be reviewed on a rolling basis every Sunday(ish))

(Please note a feature here is not an explicit endorsement unless specifically stated — I do light diligence but given time/resource constraints, am not doing rigorous diligence (so please do your own research before spending lots of time and money, etc.)

• Iroh by Abdullah Hashmi: Iroh is a voice-first AI second brain app. (And if you don’t know what a second brain is, see my reel.) You speak your thoughts on the go, and Iroh synthesizes them into a personal knowledge graph that grows over time. Live on iOS and Android.

aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week

• something i’ve been meaning to try but haven’t yet: the Claude ADHD skill 💀 (but actually, why does it always seem to be responding in metaphor, lol)

• verdict is in: most of you thought this was insane (but also even as a non-parent… i’m kinda jealous 🤪)

• brave confession (/s): i went on the openai creator brand trip

  1) WE ARE SO EARLY. If you want to be a creator or entrepreneur or work for yourself or whatever, everything is being disrupted - meaning more room for the underdog (yay). I was surprised to meet so many creators that were less than a year in yet have made full time careers of it. There is so. much. opportunity. (especially for the people willing to take shots on goal)

  2) despite social media backlash aside (topic for a different day), i learned SO MUCH from their team about elevated ways of using ChatGPT (not just as a glorified search engine about, but to actually do the work and life admin I dread). People built automatic return reminders/alerts, auto-watching and booking for rare hotel/restaurant bookings, side projects built making real $, an education system for their kids, etc etc.

  video coming soon on how to build your own chief of staff (something I use daily) + if you use it for anything cool (automations, side projects, etc, reply and let me know! or submit it here so i can feature)

<3 until next week!